Medicaments are often provided in the form of pills, and many pills are in the form of tablets comprising compressed agglomerations of powder. These tablets are capable of being crushed into smaller pieces and/or powder.
There are several problems associated with administering medicaments in a tablet form. Many people have difficulty swallowing tablets, and it is not uncommon for such people to require that the tablets be crushed to make them easier to swallow. In an institutional setting (for example, in a hospital), it is common to crush tablets into smaller pieces and/or powder and to mix the resulting smaller pieces and powder into pudding or some other food substance to make the medicament more easily ingestible.
At one time, pills were crushed in hospitals using a mortar and pestle. The use of a mortar and pestle was long ago abandoned, due to several problems. Primarily, a mortar and pestle required too much time and energy to use, and required cleaning between uses to avoid cross-contamination of the medications in the crushed tablets.
Accordingly, over the years many mechanical devices have been suggested for crushing pills, among them those devices described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,631,786, 3,915,393, 4,003,523, 4,199,863, 4,366,930, 4,694,996, 4,824,000, 5,123,601, 5,178,337, 5,823,451, 5,863,001, 5,915,637, 5,924,636, 6,059,209 and 6,357,679.
Each one of these prior art pill crushers has disadvantages, however. Either they are not capable of crushing the large numbers of pills which are crushed daily in an institutional setting, or they do not provide means to avoid cross-contamination of crushed medications unless they are thoroughly cleaned between uses (which requires a significant amount of time and energy), or they require a considerable amount of force to use. The latter is a significant problem in institutional settings where hundreds of pills might be required to be crushed by a single person (perhaps a nurse) each day. While large-scale crushers have also been proposed, these are generally electrically-powered, heavy devices, and are not portable.
The need remains, accordingly, for a portable pill crusher capable of easily crushing large numbers of pills using only a small amount of force, and in which cross-contamination of medications is easily avoided.